Forgiveness

Pondering the underpinnings...

Personality compositions are a mixed bag - as they’re designed to be. If we were all alike, what a bore that would be.

Something I’ve realized just today, and perhaps a little late in the game, as a sensitive soul (also known as introverts and INFPs on the personality spectrum), is that there are occasions when my sensitivity can work against me. While it makes me a good writer, an empathetic friend, and a stellar observer, it also means I absorb hurt like an unused sponge...and there it can stay…indefinitely. Oh, let’s not be polite. In some cases, pain and hurt feelings have embedded like wall-to-wall carpeting and stayed permanently.

This downside also translates to me having a hard time with forgiveness. I don’t like that tendency, but it’s important to own it without judgement.

As I engaged with my morning contemplative practice several hours ago, I was overwhelmed with a tidal wave of emotion and realization. The information that rolled in was nothing new under the sun, but, in a moment of unguarded receptivity, it descended like a revelation: We all hurt others at one time or another, sometimes deliberately and other times unintentionally. I’ve done it, Lord knows, many times over my lifetime. And if I know that it doesn’t make me a bad person, but a flawed one, how then, can I continue to resent someone who has hurt me? The hardest hurdle of all for me is agreeing to forgive in the absence of admission of error or made-amends, but I’m feeling exceptionally limber at the moment.

Today, I’ve decided to release my grip, enlarge my view of others - heck - why not the entire race of humanity while I’m at it? We all come into this world innocent and overloaded with joy - one of the reasons being in the company of toddlers is so irresistible. Remembering this primal purity helps shift the equation somehow for me.

This space I created on Substack more than two years ago has been an invaluable refuge for a bottled-up former elective mute to release a lifetime of stored explosives that resulted from the atrocities of my past. I’ll continue on that path of respectful release for as long as there’s still a head of steam a-brewing that needs long-overdue attention. Expression is part of the process, and a necessary component to forgiveness. Today, I just took a few giant steps (to quote my favorite childhood game, ‘Mother May I?’) toward my ability to forgive another.

We are born carrying abundant Light. Then Life proceeds to push (or drag) us down some bumpy roads, and we’re violated - and we forget. But the good news is, we can always remember.

Today, I am deciding to do that more often.

Practice, after all, makes practiced.